Zoho Launches Next Generation of Office Suite with AI Features

Zoho announced at Zoholics Mexico City its new version of Zoho Office Suite, which includes four sophisticated, cloud-based productivity software applications—Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Show, and Zoho Notebook—enhanced with Zia, Zoho’s AI-powered assistant. Zoho Office Suite provides deep contextual collaboration to meet the diverse, end-to-end business needs of users, whether they are part of a small business or enterprise.

Applications in the Zoho Office Suite are not only integrated among themselves, but also with Zoho’s communications tools (Zoho Mail and Cliq, a cross-platform messaging app), Zoho’s collaboration tools (Zoho Projects and Zoho Connect, a private social network for business), as well as Zoho’s several other business applications. These contextual integrations, for example, enable users to merge data from Zoho CRM into a document and send it for signature through Zoho Sign.

“The future of work will be characterized by secure, contextual, and intelligent digital workplace platforms that are fully integrated across collaboration, productivity, and business applications to support seamless workflows,” said David Smith, founder and principal of Inflow Analysis. “The approach Zoho is taking shows deep understanding of this convergence and the critical need for a fully integrated platform that supports how people actually work. We believe this a challenge to major technology providers that need to address serious gaps in their portfolios and add adjacencies.”

In Zoho Sheet, Zia offers deep insights into users’ data sets by automatically showing the most relevant charts and pivot tables for their data. Zoho Sheet also supports Natural Language Querying where users can ask Zia questions about their data and Zia will respond with the appropriate function, chart, or pivot table, which can then be added to their spreadsheet. Click here for more information on Zoho Sheet’s new features.

Zoho Notebook is the newest addition to Zoho Office Suite and one of the most advanced note-taking applications on the market. Zia Voice, Zoho’s conversational AI, can help users create a customized recipe “smart card” by grabbing the relevant visuals, instructions, and shopping lists from their favorite website—all initiated by voice command—and organizing it neatly into the application.

Zoho Writer can work
completely offline on web, mobile, and iPad editions, syncing everything
to the user’s account upon reconnection.

Zoho Writer offers a
distraction-free mode, plus a focus mode that highlights the paragraph
in development and dims everything else in the document. There’s also an
option to enable typewriter sounds to bring back the nostalgia of
writing on a typewriter.

Zoho Show’s
user-focused interface helps the author easily and quickly populate
slides and choose from a variety of themes, with options to include
smart elements, tables, charts, and path animation.

Zoho First-to-Market Exclusives

Zoho Sheet is the first spreadsheet software to offer data-cleaning capabilities to address inconsistencies and eliminate duplications. The data-cleaning tool processes the given information, lists all possible errors—with options to replace them—and rectifies them at the click of a button.

Featuring custom functions powered by Zoho’s very own scripting language, Deluge, Zoho Sheet allows users to create their own personalized functions. For example, users can create a script or deploy a pre-built script to pull data across an accounting app to fill in a Zoho Sheet sales or expense report.

Zoho Show allows users to run presentations on Apple TV-enabled devices as well as Android devices by turning the user’s mobile phone into a controller, from which the presenter can beam and control slides on multiple TVs at one time.

“We built Zoho Office Suite to be the most integrated suite of productivity tools of its kind,” said Raju Vegesna, Zoho’s Chief Evangelist. “For decades, Zoho has provided tools for users to share and work on documents quickly and efficiently. Now, with this new version of Zoho Office Suite—empowered by Zia—Zoho’s integrations are tighter than ever before, providing seamless collaboration across departments and teams. We’ve added features and tools that can’t be found anywhere else, such as Notebook’s smart cards, Sheet’s data-cleansing tool, and Show’s integration with Apple TV. Just like the line between productivity and collaboration applications is fading, we see the lines between business, collaboration, productivity, and communication apps fading. It is the combination of these apps, contextually integrated, that makes the modern worker exponentially more productive!”

Pricing and Availability

Zoho Office Suite is available to single users for free, $3 per user per month for SMEs, and $6 per user per month for enterprises.